Archive for August 2009

Got this bag from my best friend the weekend we hung out. I love it! It’s really, really hard for me to carry small bags because I feel like they never carry enough of my stuff, but here’s my attempt at trying.

This skirt from American Apparel and these shoes. Unfortunately the shoes have gone through a bit of wear and I made the huge mistake one day of wearing them out in the rain so now they’re not as structured as I would like. The skirt’s shape is so flattering and it goes with everything. I just wish I came across it earlier in my summer so that I could’ve put this baby to use for more of the hot weather.

Bold rings. I’ve become obsessed with wearing a ton of rings this summer, but unfortunately, I do too much heavy work when I intern to be able to avoid denting, hitting, banging my rings all the time, so at the moment I’ve laid off on them. Can’t wait for the fall! :D

I will go ahead and say for the record that I don’t like G-Dragon as a performer. I dislike the way he raps, and I think he puts up too much of an annoying persona when he performs on stage. I don’t have a thing against YG or YG’s rappers, because I obviously don’t dislike TOP, Teddy, Jinusean, & rest of co. But I also don’t think that disliking G-Dragon as an artist is mutually exclusive to disliking him as a person because as just Kwon Ji Yong going on variety shows and what not, I think he’s incredibly funny, witty, and bubbly. I don’t know him personally so I can only tell based on the shows I’ve seen him on and I do like him outside of performing.

However, I think G-Dragon gets too much credit for a lot of what he presents to the Korean entertainment biz.

He is no doubt leagues ahead of other idol boys by the sole fact that he makes so much of his group’s music, and now his own solo work. But a lot of the work he comes up for himself is derivative. He does get a little sample happy. Yes, you can say that hip-hop centers a lot around sampling, remixing, and reworking some beats with your own flavor. But this is why for me, as a personal preference, I don’t gravitate towards songs that takes elements from other songs. On a side-note, this is one of the reasons why I felt nothing towards Kanye West’s music from his first album to his third. His fourth album, 808s and Heartbreak is probably the only album of his that is 95% sample-free and I LOVED that album. Most of the people I’ve talked to about this album felt like had gone soft and that he’s not him anymore in the album. Yeah I could’ve done without the hideous wannabe singing and the beat-to-death use of autotune, but at the end of the day, I liked that everything off that album is fresh and contained sounds that he came up with. As much as I love “Stronger,” that song would have been nothing without Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

So back to G-Dragon. Here are all the songs that have been accused of plagiarism:

Sickest editorial from an American fashion mag I’ve seen in forever. “Thriller Fashion” in September 2009’s Harper’s Bazaar:

Michael Jackson has always been regarded as a fashion icon, so it’s kind of unfortunate that all these tributes are only coming out en masse after his death. I wish the subject of his death (and subsequently how he was a mega fashion icon) wasn’t so trendy. But, gotta give props to Agyness Deyn for doing an amazing, amazing job on this.